‘After the Tall Timber’ Collects Renata Adler’s Nonfiction

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By Emily Witt

May 15, 2015

In the first essay in this new collection of nonfiction, Renata Adler writes about the cultural role of her generation. Adler was born in 1938, coming of age after the heroism of World War II and before the antics of baby boomers. “In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy,” she wrote in 1969. “We are unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call, without taking account of us, the generation gap.” Neither here nor there, she went on to explain, “we cut across,” and in this function her generation found its purpose: “At a moment of polarization, and other clichés that drain the language of meaning, the continuity of the American story seems to rest just now in us.”

At least in the field of magazine writing, this turned out to be true. Unless one lived the era directly, to think now of “the Sixties” is to refer to the writing of people born in the 1930s: Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jane Kramer, to name just a few. One generation removed from both their bewildered elders and the wayward youth, they narrated a social shift along a spectrum ranging from suggestive disdain to outright immersion. They were supported by the economic and cultural supremacy of the printed magazine. They were also very good writers, read generations later as much for their mastery of craft as for their subject matter. “Lacking slogans,” Adler wrote, “we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words.”

Which is not to say that Adler would like to be grouped with everyone in this crowd. In the past she has not so subtly made fun of Talese’s article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and accused Wolfe of making up facts. She wrote in 1969 that “I particularly detested, and detest, the ‘new journalism,’ ” which she described as “a corruption of a form which originated in The New Yorker itself.” During her almost 40 years writing for that magazine, Adler made her name covering many of the same subjects as her peers — the civil rights movement in the South, the hippies in California, the New Left — from a contrarian perspective she called the “radical middle.” She registered as a Republican in 1964 to vote for Nelson Rockefeller in the presidential primary. “In the early days of political correctness,” she wrote, “I liked to imagine . . . that I was the only Republican reporter, not just on the staff of The New Yorker, but in New York.”

Until recently younger readers who had heard of Renata ­Adler knew only that with her book “Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker,” she had engaged in some especially pyrotechnic bridge burning that estranged her from that publication; that she lived in a kind of exile in Connecticut; or perhaps that her novel “Speedboat” (1976) was included in one of David Foster Wallace’s syllabuses, for a class called “Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions.”

The republishing of “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark” (1983) by New York Review Books in 2013 led to renewed interest in her writing. Michael Wolff writes in his preface to “After the Tall Timber” that Adler “has become something of a cult figure for a new generation of literary-­minded young women.” But those of Adler’s readers expecting more ennui aboard yachts and cocktails at Elaine’s will not find such ­disaffected glamour here. “The self-­referring piece by the resourceful, intrepid, self-­referring writer, could not, no matter how amusing it might be, appear in The New Yorker,” she wrote in “Gone.”

Adler joined The New Yorker in 1963. Early dispatches covering the march for nonviolence in Selma in 1965 and the black power march in Mississippi in 1966 show a writer wary of group ­movements even when she finds herself agreeing with a cause. In addition to observational descriptions of both the ­heroes and the ­lesser-known participants, she gives space to the tedium, inaudible speeches, disorganization and sunburns that have been neglected in Hollywood reprisals. In Selma, she speculates that since the marchers have ­already won federal permission to demonstrate and forced President ­Lyndon B. Johnson to ­advocate for voting rights, “the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be ­increased” by going through with the full march as originally planned. In Mississippi, she takes great pains to assure white liberals that “Black Power” is not meant to alienate their sympathies: “To the marchers,” she explains, “it was a rallying cry for blacks to vote as a bloc, to take over communities in which they constitute a majority, and to exercise some political leverage in communities in which they constitute a large minority.”

Abroad, she covers the Six-Day War in Israel and the Biafran war with Nigeria with this same mix of anecdote and observation. As the ’60s progress, however, Adler begins to observe less and criticize more. She calls the notion of mind expansion “a ghastly misnomer,” describes the waifish teenagers gathering on the Sunset Strip as “economically unfit, devoutly bent on powerlessness” and, while covering the New Politics Convention in ­Chicago in 1967, laments its “spite politics” and the rise of “a new, young, guerrilla-talking Uncle Tom, to transact nitty-gritty politics with his radical white counterpart.” Didion and Wolfe may have written better-known articles on similar subjects; Adler’s show how Nixon got elected.

The collection includes one of her most famous pieces of writing, her evisceration, in 1980, of Pauline Kael’s “When the Lights Go Down” for The New York Review of Books. Now that the office politics of the era have faded (Adler and Kael were colleagues at The New Yorker), the review reads as scathing but well reasoned, firmly rooted in a close reading of Kael’s words. The revelation of Kael’s repetitious rhetorical tricks — “physical sadism,” “the mock rhetorical question,” “a form of prose hypochondria, palpating herself all over to see if she has a thought” — is harsh but unassailable. Less worthy of admiration is the appended “note by the author,” which suggests that she wrote the review because Kael had become an ­“aging, essentially humorless woman reveling in unimaginative talking dirty.”

By the mid-1980s, after she earns a degree from Yale Law School, Adler’s descriptive writing dimin­ishes, replaced by critical readings of texts: of documents related to the Nixon impeachment; of the Starr Report; of the Supreme Court opinion in Bush v. Gore; of The New York Times’s responses to mistakes it made in the cases of Wen Ho Lee and Jayson Blair and, she says, in articles written about herself.

Of Kael, Adler wrote that she had “lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic.” In the later pieces in this book, something similar takes place, as ­Adler’s writing becomes increasingly like a series of audits by an exasperated accountant. The parsing of legal briefs and New York Times corrections starts to take on the dryness of the ­primary source material. Adler is persuasive when she contends that The Times uses the minutiae of its corrections page as a “substitute for conscience” about mistakes that have resulted in far greater injustices than the misspelling of a name or misidentification of a butterfly. But when she advocates for the publication of “long, verbatim transcripts,” to reveal the shortcomings of reportorial synthesis and analysis, she seems to have lost faith in the task of journalism ­altogether.

Adler is the daughter of parents who fled Nazi Germany. She was a friend and disciple of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher to whom she refers most often in these pages. She has consistently written from the perspective that extremism, and the passive collaboration that abets it, are ever-present threats. Her principled stance toward unchecked power, jargon, co-optation and obsequiousness, as in a critical 1970 article about the National Guard after the shootings at Kent State, reveals real dangers to democracy. But sometimes her vigilance clouds her ability to describe change, let alone helpfully interpret it.

Then there are her orthodoxies about writing. For the callow reader, who might not have minded some repetitious bawdi­ness in a movie review, who enjoys ­nonfiction that reads like a novel, who has indulged in New Age metaphysics, who suffers white guilt or black anger, who fails to crosscheck the long, verbatim transcripts: It is not for such a reader to be disappointed in Adler; she has already expressed her disappointment in us.